Our big summer project is finally live. Using knowledge gained while working on whiteboards, we’ve rebuilt maps from the ground up and are very excited for you to start using them.

We spend a lot of focus on making it so that you no longer need to leave the map’s page when adding or editing markers. We want most of the experience to be available directly here.

New interface

The first thing you’ll see when opening maps is that they look different. We’ve dropped the 1990’s “teadrop” so that icons “live” on the map directly.

The legend panel can now be searched, and you can add a new group directly from it.

When clicking on a marker, it opens it’s preview panel on the right. This panel now includes the marker’s group, total surface area (if an area), total length (if a new path), a clear link to an entry. If the linked entry is a map, it shows an explore link to view that map. If the linked entry is a location with multiple maps, it shows a link for each map.

The panel finishes with a bunch of actions to speed up your process. Duplicate especially will feel amazing when adding lots of markers.

Adding markers

The new toolbar at the bottom allows you to quickly add a new marker on the map. Enabling Rapid mode allows you to continue placing new markers of the same type continuously. The new add form has also been redesigned.

Looking at how people used the old maps interface, most just placed markers with a name or linked entry and called it a day, coming back later to add more detail. This is why the panel now starts in a “light” mode. Clicking “details” shows every field.

Templates become a center space of the new interface, with using them, saving them, and managing them contained here.

The colour picker was also re-built to just show recently used colours.

We’ve replaced the “shape” dropdown with a clear list of options (and adding 5 more shapes for non-premium campaigns). The last button enables entering a custom shape from FontAwesome, RPGAwesome, or a custom SVG.

At the end of the form is an advanced section with some barely used fields. We’ve dropped the “pin size” field completely from this new interface.

Path marker

We’re introducing a new “path” marker type which allows you to draw paths on the map. It automatically calculates the distance of the path is the map has a distance unit set.

Panel Settings

Clicking on the map’s name brings up a dropdown to edit some of the map’s settings like grid, distance units, etc. These changes are applied directly without having to reload the page. This makes setting these values fundamentally less frustrating.

Those of you with proficiency in perception will notice that the last option is to render the map using the old legacy “teardrop” layout in case you came to love the retro look.

Editing

When editing a marker, you stay on the map. Changes are applied directly. You can directly move a marker around, or reshape an area, a path, a circle, etc.

A note on marker descriptions

Writing a description for a marker now happens always with the new Tiptap text editor, as the legacy Summernote editor simply does not work with modern code.

As part of this update, we’re also adding that entries mentioned in markers show up in the entry’s mentions subpage.

Groups

Groups can be created directly from the new interface (editing and deleting groups still happens in the old UI). We’ve also added a colour field for groups to be able to visually split them up.

Multi-user interactivity

When we built whiteboards, we focused a lot of effort on building the foundations for interactivity — aka when a user does something, others get to see the change directly applied on their end.

The new maps were built with this in mind. Adding, editing, deleting markers, changing map settings, adding/editing groups, a lot of stuff (that wasn’t a huge pain to support) now goes live to everyone at once.

We’ve also added that when multiple members of a campaign have a map open, that info is visible and their cursor’s position is shared.

PS: there is currently no setting to disable the cursor sharing.

Dashboard maps

Maps rendered on a dashboard now use the new rendering engine but skips the panels and edit interfaces. Clicking on a marker will take the user to the full new maps interface, focused on that marker, with it’s detail panel open.

Tiling

We’ve added automatic tiling support for large (>10 MiB) maps. This splits up the image into hundreds of smaller images for each zoom level, so that big maps are now close to instantaneous to load. This automatically happens for every new map, while old maps get asked once when opening them if they want to convert the image to tiles. Depending on the size of the image, this can take a few minutes.

Edit: turns out the coordinate system between a flat image and a tiled image is completely different with no easy way for me to calculate a delta, so this feature has been removed for now. All new large maps will automatically use tiling.

Missing from v4.0

I’ve spent months on this and eventually needed to ship something. Here are a few things not currently possible that I hope to add in the future.

• Group management: Currently you can add groups, but you cannot manage them (edit, delete). The old UI is still used for that.
• Layer management: missing completely from the new UI, because I kept hitting issues with loading images dynamically in. Use the old UI for now.
• Bulk edit markers: would be great, but out of scope for now. Use the old UI for now.
• Cursor off toggle: already covered earlier.

General improvements

Each page now loads one less javascript file, and we’ve updated a lot of javascript dependencies to much newer versions. This just means Kanka’s code is now more secure and slightly faster to load.

In the experimental text editor, switching from normal to source mode and vice-versa now does it’s best guess at keeping your cursor at the same point. Search and replace has also been added in the source mode.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug in grid lists where switching from a child back to the parent node and then to another child would sometimes result in Kanka thinking there are no children to display.

Editing entry media files no longer results in an error.

Fixed the attribute filters to allow searching for checkboxes, and added ! negation syntax support.

Phew, that was a big update.

---

As always, a huge thank you to our amazing subscribers for making these frequent updates possible. Come say hi on our Discord we share early previews of what’s coming next.